Icerocket Gets Acquired

Icerocket gets sold. Serial entrepreneur Marc Cuban does it again. Icerocket, an integral part of the blogosphere, operates a real time search engine that focuses on blogs and RSS. It recently started providing the latest in top news, business, technology, health, and sports stories etc, and added multimedia search in a limited way. Think Partnership’s Litmus Media's Valid Click network and PrimaryAds' affiliate marketing network would now co-opt icerocket community – a step in integrating popular medium into the world of business. Think partnership recently closed the acquisition of Litmus media ( less than ten days back). The ValidClick Search Network serves pay-per-click search advertising, local search advertising, shopping comparison and coupon content to over 1,000 search engines and web directories processing over 90 million searches per month.
As I see it, there comes a stage in a company's life when different strategies might be needed to foster growth in new dimensions -particularly when competition more or less catches up over a period of time. Icerocket had many choices in front of it : expand aggressively provide support for tags, folksonomy etc or increase the search to include new arena's beyond the original plan of tracking blogs & RSS, extend into vertical search like others, spin of its feed burning service etc. Compared to Technorati, Icerocket had always been ice cool - very reliable and simple to use.Too often the value of community built is spoken of as very high and in this case it appears that Icerocket is taking efforts to capitalize on this. Watch for developments at Technorati and clearly lot more action is ahead in the blogsophere.